March 2, 2016 3 Essential Email Marketing Metrics You Need To Focus On

Anna Milwardwrote on March 2, 2016

Email marketing may be one of the most effective marketing platforms out there, but how do you know if your hard work is really paying off?

Tracking your metrics is the best way to see whether your campaigns are hitting the mark, but with so many numbers to keep track of it can all be a bit overwhelming, at least to start with.

Analyzing your email marketing results doesn’t have to be too complicated, if you know what to look for. Depending on what you are looking to achieve, much of the information available will probably be irrelevant or unnecessary if you just want to get a basic idea of how your campaign is doing.

Here are the three crucial email marketing metrics that you should focus on. If you want to look at more that’s great, but these will give you a good insight into your campaign’s success or otherwise.

1. Subscriber retention rate. Getting names on your list is the first challenge, but the real indication of how relevant your emails are is in how many people stick around in the long term. If you have a high number of unsubscribes whenever you send an email it could be a sign that your emails aren’t relevant or interesting to your recipients.

2. Conversion rate. This is probably the most important metric of all, because when it comes down to it, you are sending emails for a specific reason (if you’re not, you should be!). Your conversion rate shows the percentage of recipients who completed the desired action, whether it was to buy a product, click through to your website or fill out a form.

3. Open rate. This is an obvious metric that shows how many of your recipients are actually opening and reading your emails. Your open rate is important because it can tell you how effective your email headline and content is and whether your emails are relevant to your target recipients.

If you are keen to delve further into your email analytics you can gain a lot of insight by looking at other metrics but these three are the basic numbers you should be looking at regularly.

Depending on what your goals are, it’s a good idea to regularly review your email marketing campaigns so you can see whether you are getting the results you want. Tracking the results of your marketing campaign lets you see what works and what doesn’t so you can get the optimum results from your email marketing campaign.